Currently, people spend many hours a day with technological devices, but most don't know how they work, or how to make their own. For all the interactivity of these devices, people are bound to passive consumption. Furthermore, playing, creating, or integrating electronics into projects, toys and products is intimidating, time consuming, requires an expert skill set, as well as specialized hardware/software platforms. People are afraid to connect electronic objects the wrong way, or to electrocute themselves. This makes building objects with lights, sounds, buttons and other electronic components very difficult and prohibitive to kids, young students, designers, non-engineers, and others lacking necessary experience. But as advances in the miniaturization of technology increase, electronics need to become more accessible to non-experts in a cost effective manner.
It becomes therefore clear that there is an opportunity and need to create a simple, easy to use, accessible electronic building block platform that can still enable the creation of complex, interdependent systems. Such a platform would enhance learning, enable 21st century experimentation and promote innovation. Also, what is needed is a system that acts like an additional material in the creative process and allows children and adults to combine and incorporate the system or its parts with other traditional materials such as paper, cardboard and screws.
The following references provide background information and are hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety: Ayah Bdeir, (2009), Electronics as material: littleBits, In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI '09), ACM, New York, N.Y., USA, 39-400, DOI=10.1145/1517664.1517743, at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1517664.1517743; and Ayah Bdeir and Ted Ullrich, (2010), Electronics as material: littleBits, In Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction (TEI '11), ACM, New York, N.Y., USA, 341-344, DOI=10.1145/1935701.1935781, at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1935701.1935781.